Do you know any hidden or little-known nice feature of OS X 10.7 (Lion)? It doesn't matter what it is—maybe just a short terminal command. Share your experiences on hidden OS X features here.

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Also provide details on how to achieve that feature, and if possible, include a relevant image too!

That's effectively a move operation. I'm not a Mac user and am wondering if this is the first time it's been made available through key strokes?
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jdkJul 29 '11 at 3:04

3

Yes. The problem with cut and paste is that it's destructive (When you cut the file got deleted, if you never paste the file again, that file is lost). So Mac never supports cut and paste (but supports drag and drop, again because that's not destructive). Thus this implementation is very elegant.
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Enrico SusatyoJul 31 '11 at 3:08

7

@the_great_monkey: Just clarifying: Cut isn't destructive on any system I know. On Windows, the user interface seems to suggest file “disappears” when it is cut (it becomes pale) but if you never paste, it'll be right there as well.
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DanAug 6 '11 at 0:18

5

Every time a Windows refugee asks "why can't I cut and paste files in Finder?", someone else always responds with that same argument ("what if you never paste?"). Why do they assume that such a behavior would be so stupidly implemented? As Dan Abramov mentioned, "cutting" files has never been destructive on any system I've used.
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peterjmagAug 6 '11 at 2:32

2

Wow, glad I found this. The lack of cut and paste in the Finder is maddening, but I just accepted it as an annoyance and never bothered to pursue it because I assumed it was a weird philosophical decision that would have a nonsensical justification. Apparently I was right, I've put a lot of time in on other operating systems and have never been burned by dangerous cut and paste behavior, the "destructive" line of reasoning is asinine. Glad to know that there is an equivalent behavior.
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SuboptimusDec 24 '11 at 8:18

does this really kill the spell check or does this just get rid of the accent character picker?
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Bryan SchuetzJul 27 '11 at 1:31

@Bryan this should only affect the Press&Hold accent char picker. The spell checker is available in System Preferences and sometimes (bugs) it has to be manually disabled per-app.
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Martín MarconciniJul 27 '11 at 2:06

man sysdiagnose
What sysdiagnose Collects:
o A spindump of the system
o Several seconds of fs_usage ouput
o Several seconds of top output
o Data about kernel zones
o Status of loaded kernel extensions
o Resident memory usage of user processes
o All system logs, kernel logs, opendirectory log, windowserver log, and log of power management events
o A System Profiler report
o All spin and crash reports
o Disk usage information
o I/O Kit registry information
o Network status
o If a specific process is supplied as an argument: list of malloc-allocated buffers in the process's heap is
collected
o If a specific process is supplied as an argument: data about unreferenced malloc buffers in the process's
memory is collected
o If a specific process is supplied as an argument: data about the virtual memory regions allocated in the
process

If you are selecting a rectangle for making a screenshot (e.g. with ⇧+⌘+4) you can press and hold space to reposition the origin point of the rectangle without resizing it. Holding ⇧ at the same time you can reposition the rectangle at along an axis. And if you hold only ⇧ you can resize the rectangle along an axis (in both cases depending on the direction you initially move the mouse).

This is quite handy if you need to make precise screenshots and you don't want to spend a lot of time post processing your screenshots. The only bad thing about the selection rectangle is the fact that the borders are 2 pixels wide which makes it difficult to see the exact bounding of the rectangle.

In Mail, it used to be the case that when you clicked on a folder in the list of folders, it was very easy for your mouse (or finger) to slip a bit, causing the folder to be picked up and dropped inside a neighbouring folder.

My mother, who has arthritis, and so finds accurate mouse clicking by no means easy, often lost mail folders by doing this.

Lion fixes the problem: if you slip when clicking on a folder in Mail, you only select the neighbouring folder, with no harm done. It's a very subtle and impressive piece of user interface design, that most users will never notice.

It might be obvious for everyone else except me, but I just noticed that pressing the right arrow key in Mail.app when a collapsed thread is selected still expands the thread as it used to work in Mail in Snow Leopard and before. This is very useful when one wants to flag only one email of a long thread as it is easy to navigate to the right email and pressing ⌘+⇧+L to flag it - no need to use the mouse.

When using a Magic Mouse, you can enable a gesture to start Mission Control when you two-finger double tap the mouse (just tapping the surface, no clicking needed) in System Preferences > Mouse > More Gestures (tab).

If this feature is enabled, you can hover the mouse cursor over a dock icon, use the same gesture for Mission Control, but instead you will show all windows for the particular application being hovered over.

EDIT: Furthermore, when you use the gesture over a dock icon, it will show the recent items (for the appropriate apps) at the bottom of the screen.